Mary Queen of Scots (29 page)

9 Conciliation and Reconciliation

Exactly how different her new kingdom was from her old one, the young queen was speedily to discover on her very first Sabbath in Scotland. Up till that morning there had been, in Knox’s phrase, nothing but ‘mirth and quietness’, but on the Sunday Mary, who had been assured by Lord James of the private practice of her religion, ordered Mass to be said in the chapel royal at Holyrood.
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The preparations for the service were all too familiar to a country which had only been officially Protestant for one year. The onlookers exclaimed furiously: ‘Shall the idol be suffered again to take place within this realm?’ and speedily resolved: ‘It shall not!’ Patrick Lindsay, the future Lord Lindsay of the Byres, went so far as to shout out in the courtyard that the idolatrous priest should be put to death. The servant carrying the altar candles was put into a state of terror when his candles were seized by one of the crowd, and together with some of the altar ornaments, either broken or trodden into the mud. The reformers did not actually penetrate the chapel itself: here at the very threshold they found the person of the Lord James, barring their entry: not only had he given his word to Mary that the private Mass should be respected, but he also had a devout horror of such extremism. Inside the chapel the queen, her Guise uncles and her French servants attended a Mass which was understandably fraught with tension – the English ambassador reported that the priest was in such a state of mortal fear, that he could hardly lift the Host at the Elevation.
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If the queen received a rude shock from the incident, she did not allow it to affect her determinedly tolerant religious policy. The next day, Monday 25 August, she issued a proclamation in which she announced that she intended with the aid of her Estates to take a final order, which she hoped would please everyone, to pacify the differences in religion. In the meantime, she charged the whole world, in order to prevent tumult or sedition to make no alteration or innovation in the state of religion, or to attempt anything against the form of public worship which she had found standing on her arrival in Scotland – under pain of death. She further commanded that no one should molest any of her domestic servants or those who had come with her out of France in the practice of their religion – equally under pain of death.

This proclamation may seem to us, from a modern stand-point, comparatively wise, and certainly singularly free from Catholic bigotry. It aroused, however, the venomous ire of many of the extremist Protestants, and especially that of their leading evangelist, John Knox. The next Sunday Knox took the opportunity of preaching a great denunciation of the Mass from the pulpit: one Mass, he declaimed, was more fearful to him than ten thousand armed enemies being landed in any part of the realm. While still in France, Mary had already formed the most unfavourable impression of Knox, and she told Throckmorton that she believed him to be the most dangerous man in her kingdom. Now she determined to grasp the nettle. She sent for Knox to come to Holyrood, and here took place the first of those dramatic interviews, which as recounted by Knox himself in his
History
, have a positively Biblical flavour.

Knox was now a man of forty-seven; having been rescued from ‘the puddle of papistry’, as he put it,
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by George Wishart in the 1540s; he had joined the murderers of Cardinal Beaton in the castle of St Andrews, and after its fall, had done a spell in the galleys. On release he went to England, and from there, on the accession of Mary Tudor, to the Continent where his travels brought him finally to Geneva, where he became a disciple of Calvin. He returned to Scotland in 1555, where the strength of his character and the force of his convictions enabled him to win over many of the greater men to Protestantism by his evangelism when the lesser men had long been interested in it. His main contribution to the Scottish Reformation had thus been made before Mary Stuart’s arrival in Scotland, and indeed before the death of Mary of Guise; but his personality ensured that he remained a potent force on the Scottish scene, and it was an unlucky hazard for Mary Stuart that he happened to be living in Edinburgh, the first year of her residence there, to act as a demoniac chorus for all
her actions, which good or bad, he presented in the most malevolent light.

Knox’s character was compounded of many contradictions. He saw himself as a heaven-sent preacher, whereas in fact he was a bold earthly revolutionary, who openly preached violence, and notoriously considered the death of an unjust ruler absolutely justified. He was a good summarizer of the accepted truth; but he was a savage hater, and obstinate defender of a position once he had adopted it. Lord Eustace Percy in his life of Knox made a sympathetic examination of the reformer’s true nature and decided that his real spiritual bent was that of the mystic who was compelled by events to adopt the role of preacher and interpreter: ‘In the whole sweep of the Old Testament and the New, what first caught his ear was a voice which almost passes the range of human hearing: neither the words of God to man, nor the words of man to God, but a fragment of the huge soliloquy of God himself.’
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Knox was an egoist, but his egoism led him to be a cunning politician and excellent lawyer, with an eye to the essentials in any argument. He was not born to the nobility, yet he was immensely brave in his confrontations with the nobles and the queen: as Morton said at his tomb: ‘Here lies one who never feared the face of man.’ His virtues included a ferocious, rather coarse sense of humour, seen in his writings, very different from Mary’s own light ironic sense of humour, it is true, but something which might have enabled them to strike better accord if circumstances had been different; he was also genuinely patriotic, when few men even knew the meaning of the word. Above all, he loved to dominate, as with so many egoists, and it was this need for domination which doomed his relations with Mary from the start. Scotland, and especially Edinburgh, was his stage: he the great preacher, the victor of the Scottish Reformation, was not going to surrender the front of the stage to the young queen, newly come from France. In his imagination he saw even his first encounter with her as a battle, from which he must emerge victorious if the whole Scottish Reformation was not to be imperilled. Knox thus braced himself for the meeting, like an ancient Catholic saint about to wrestle with the devil, not a mature Protestant politician about to meet a young girl who had so far shown herself to be remarkably tolerant in both word and deed. In short, Knox, in his preconceived notions about Mary, was quite as determinedly misguided, if not in such a romantic spirit, as many of her partisans have been since.

Mary’s very sex was against her in Knox’s opinion: whereas in the sixteenth century it was theoretically considered to be against the natural law for women to rule men, nevertheless most people were content to regard an actual woman ruler as a necessary evil which might have to be
endured from time to time. Knox, however, went much further than his contemporaries and in his
First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
, published in 1558 against Mary Tudor, declared roundly that to promote any woman – those ‘weak, frail, impatient feeble and foolish creatures’ – to any form of rule was the ‘subversion of good order, of all equity and justice’, as well as being contrary to God and repugnant to nature.
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Now on 4 September he was confronted in a personal interview with one of these feeble and foolish creatures sitting on the throne of his own country of Scotland.

Lord James was also present at the interview, but tactfully stayed in the background. Mary began by attacking Knox for raising her subjects against her mother and herself, and also for writing
The Monstrous Regiment.
Knox conceded the point about her sex, and said that if she behaved well, and the realm was not brought to disaster by her femininity, he personally would not disallow her rule, on those grounds alone. When Mary struggled with him over the religious issue, however, she found him much less accommodating. Finally Knox agreed to tolerate her for the time being – his phrase, which owed little to courtly flattery, was ‘to be as well content to live under your Grace as Paul was to live under Nero’ – provided that she did not defile her hands by dipping them in the blood of the saints of God. But he still firmly asserted the right of the subject to rise up against the unworthy ruler, who opposed God’s word. Mary was quite clever enough to see the dangers in this, and quite bold enough to say so: ‘Well then,’ she exclaimed, ‘I perceive that my subjects shall obey you, and not me; and shall do what they list and not what I command: and so must I be subject to them and not they to me.’ When Knox replied that this subjection to God, as represented by his Church, would carry her to everlasting glory, Mary pointed out: ‘Yea … but ye are not the Kirk that I will nurse. I will defend the Kirk of Rome, for, I think, it is the true Kirk of God.’ But Knox refused to admit Mary’s ability to judge on such matters: ‘Conscience requireth knowledge,’ he said, ‘And I fear right knowledge ye have none.’ Mary said quickly: ‘But I have both heard and read.’
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The result of this interview was an
impasse
in terms of human relations. Knox has been accused of speaking churlishly to the queen: he certainly spoke to her in a manner to which she was scarcely accustomed from her life in France, but she on the other hand seems to have been stimulated rather than otherwise by his abruptness. It is true that she relapsed into tears at one moment: but Randolph thought they were tears of anger rather than grief. All her life Mary Stuart had a feminine ability to give
herself suddenly up to tears when her sensibilities were affronted; she seems to have used it as a useful method of relieving her feelings; it never prevented her actions from being extremely hard-headed once she had recovered her composure. Knox himself quickly realized that Mary was far from being a feeble puppet, which her career in France might have led him to expect. He told his friends: ‘If there be not in her a proud mind, a crafty wit and an indurate heart against God and his truth, my judgement faileth me.’ In the same vein, he reported to Cecil in London that on communication with her he had spied such craft as he had not found in such an age.
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Mary was still being so enthusiastically greeted by her subjects that an incident in the chapel royal, a rude sermon from Knox, and one brusque interview were not enough to damp her spirits. She had been received with elaborate rejoicings on her ceremonial entry into Edinburgh: here were to be seen fifty townsmen dressed up as Moors, in yellow taffeta costumes, their arms and legs blackened, and black visors on their faces, and on a stage at the Tolbooth four fair virgins representing the virtues, while at Cross, there were four more virgins in ‘most heavenly clothing’, and from the spouts of the Cross wine poured forth abundantly. Some of the sights had undercurrents of Protestantism – a child who appeared at the Butter Tron, descending out of a painted cloud from a temporary wooden gateway, presented her pointedly with a Bible and a Psalter, and when she reached Holyrood once more, another child made a speech suggesting she should put away the Mass. But a scheme for burning an effigy of a priest saying Mass had been abandoned at the instance of the Catholic Huntly in favour of merely burning effigies of Coron, Nathan and Abiron, the sons of Izhar and Eliab, to represent the evil of false sacrifices – a message which it was a great deal easier for the queen politely to ignore. Indeed Knox thought the welcome given to Queen Mary so irritatingly lavish, that he remarked indignantly that in their farces, masks and other prodigalities ‘fain would the fools have counterfeited France’.
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After three weeks at Holyrood, Mary set out for a short progress round her kingdom: here again she was met with the same combination of enthusiasm, marred by occasional incidents where the truth of the Protestant religion was suddenly felt to need public demonstration. She went first to Linlithgow, the palace of her birth, and after two days on to Stirling. Here she was endangered by human rather than the divine fire with which Knox had threatened her: a candle accidentally set light to her bed curtains while she was asleep. Although the fire was quickly put out, Randolph took the opportunity to record an old prophecy that a queen should be
burnt alive in Stirling, which, he said, apparently with some regret, had proved just about as successful as Lady Huntly’s prophecy that Mary would never reach Scotland.
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On Sunday there was some sort of incident when her chaplains tried to sing High Mass in the chapel royal, and it was said that the earl of Argyll, a leading Protestant, and Lord James disturbed them; after a fracas some of the priests and clerks left their places with bloody heads and broken ears but the most part of the congregation seem to have taken the incident calmly. At Perth, although the pageants once more had a sternly anti-Catholic slant, the queen herself was greeted extremely honourably, and presented with a golden heart, filled with more pieces of gold.